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copied!<ol> <li><p>A good framework.<br> PHP has many to choose from: <a href="http://framework.zend.com/" rel="noreferrer">Zend's</a>, <a href="http://solarphp.com/" rel="noreferrer">Solar</a>, <a href="http://cakephp.org/" rel="noreferrer">CakePHP</a>, <a href="http://www.symfony-project.org/" rel="noreferrer">Symfony</a>, <a href="http://kohanaphp.com/home" rel="noreferrer">Kohana</a>. A good framework will take of most of the tedious parts of application development, allowing you to spend more time on implementing project-specific domain logic. A framework will also help enforce a consistent coding style, usually has plenty of documentation and most are very well tested and stable overall.</p></li> <li><p>A good IDE.<br> For any serious developer a good IDE is a must. Project organization, directory navigation, code-completion and various useful extensions (for example, for file versioning systems) are all big productivity boosters. PHP has several good IDE's including <a href="http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/" rel="noreferrer">Zend Studio</a> and <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/" rel="noreferrer">PDT for Eclipse</a>.</p></li> <li><p>Build system.<br> Build scripts are useful for automatic repetitive tasks such as setting directory/file permissions, SVN updates, running tests and so forth before moving a project between phases (dev / staging / production). I use mainly <a href="http://phing.info/trac/" rel="noreferrer">Phing</a> (an <a href="http://ant.apache.org/" rel="noreferrer">Ant</a> clone) for building and deploying projects.</p></li> <li><p>Profiling and debugging tools.<br> Those two needs are solved by same tool - <a href="http://www.xdebug.org/" rel="noreferrer">xdebug</a>, which offers improved debugging capabilities and can also generate <a href="http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/Home.html" rel="noreferrer">kcachegrind</a> reports for profiling your application. I then use <a href="http://code.google.com/p/webgrind/" rel="noreferrer">webgrind</a> to access those reports.</p></li> <li><p>Op-code cache.<br> PHP incurs a major performance hit from its run-time complilation scheme. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_accelerator" rel="noreferrer">Op-code caches</a> do wonders to improve on this by caching scripts in their compiled state, avoiding the overhead of compilation on cache hit. I use <a href="http://www.php.net/apc" rel="noreferrer">APC</a> as my op-code cache when I have the opportunity.</p></li> <li><p>Various open-source packages.<br> PHP being open-source as a language, has a long tradition of open-source development. There are many high-quality / useful packages for most common (and some uncommon) needs, which can save major development time. I've used <a href="http://wordpress.org/" rel="noreferrer">wordpress</a> and <a href="http://www.joomla.org/" rel="noreferrer">joomla</a> as blogging platforms, <a href="http://htmlpurifier.org/" rel="noreferrer">HTML Purifier</a> for sanitizing and validating HTML, <a href="http://code.google.com/p/minify/" rel="noreferrer">minify</a> for minifying and concatenating CSS and Javascript among others.</p></li> <li><p>Source file versioning.<br> A must regardless of programming language. I use <a href="http://subversion.tigris.org/" rel="noreferrer">SVN</a> with a <a href="http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/" rel="noreferrer">tortoise</a> client (for windows).</p></li> </ol>

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